In My Time - Dick Cheney [175]
We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy. We were not simply going to go after the individuals or cells of terrorists responsible for 9/11. We were going to bring down their networks and go after the organizations, nations, and people who lent them support. In 2011 this is a familiar notion, but in 2001 it was all new, and as Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and I talked in Holly Lodge on that cool September night, we understood that this would be a long war. There would be no easy, quick victory followed by an enemy surrender. I thought it probable that this was a conflict in which our nation would be engaged for the rest of my lifetime.
WHEN THE NSC CONVENED the next morning, the subject was primarily Afghanistan, where al Qaeda’s leadership had plotted the attacks on the United States and trained those who carried them out. Since 1996, Afghanistan had been under the control of the Taliban, who had imposed an extreme form of Islam on the country, closing schools for girls, forbidding music, and carrying out grisly executions. The Taliban had gotten the world’s attention earlier in 2001 by blowing up two monumental sixth-century Buddhas at Bamiyan in central Afghanistan on the grounds that they were idols.
George Tenet described what the CIA could accomplish in Afghanistan with increased authority and expanded covert operations, working with the Northern Alliance, a group of fierce fighters opposed to the Taliban. Their leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by al Qaeda a few days before 9/11 in an effort to diminish the Northern Alliance’s fighting capability.
Outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, also spoke, laying out a military plan that was not yet fully formed. It gave the president three options: a series of cruise missile strikes, cruise missile strikes plus a bombing campaign, or cruise missile strikes, a bombing campaign, and American forces on the ground in Afghanistan. None of the options was good. It wasn’t clear, for example, what mission the troops on the ground would have.
At around noon, the president declared a break for a few hours. I headed back to my cabin and asked the Camp David operator to connect me to Lyzbeth Glick, wife of Jeremy Glick, one of the heroes of United Flight 93. Glick, who had just turned thirty-one, had called his wife from the plane. He told her that hijackers had taken over the aircraft and already killed one passenger. Jeremy wasn’t going down without a fight, and he hatched a plot with some of his fellow passengers to try to take the plane back. He spoke final words to his wife, told her to take care of their three-month-old daughter, and then said, “We’re going to rush the hijackers.” In the battle that followed, the brave passengers aboard Flight 93 gave their lives and saved the lives of so many others. The plane they were on might well have been intended by the hijackers to crash into the Capitol or the White House. Although nothing could provide comfort for her in these terrible days, I wanted Lyzbeth Glick to know that her husband’s last act had been one of tremendous bravery and heroism, for which the nation was deeply grateful.
It was only later that we would learn fully of all the acts of heroism that took place on September 11, from the passengers on Flight 93, to the rescue workers who rushed into the burning World Trade Center, to the federal workers who pulled their colleagues out of the rubble of the Pentagon. Out of a day that caused many to wonder at the evil in the world came innumerable acts of goodness and selfless courage.
Meeting with some of the brave recovery workers at Ground Zero